Awami League

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design of Bengali flag

From its founding in 1949, the Awami League was the expression of Bengali nationalism in the territory then known as East Pakistan. Following elections in December 1970, which the league won, the military ruler of Pakistan canceled the National Assembly. Opposition to this by the Awami League led to the creation of a national flag for the Bengali homeland, Bangladesh. The flag of Bangladesh,...

founding by Rahman

...at the Universities of Calcutta and Dacca (now Dhaka). Although jailed briefly as a teenager for agitating for Indian independence, he began his formal political career in 1949 as a cofounder of the Awami League. The league advocated political autonomy for East Pakistan, the detached eastern part of Pakistan. Mujib’s arrest in the late 1960s incited mob violence that eroded the Pakistani...

history of Pakistan

...was held in East Bengal. The contest was between the Muslim League government and a “United Front” of parties led by the Krishak Sramik party of Fazlul Haq (Fazl ul-Haq) and the Awami League of Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, Mujibur Rahman, and Maulana Bhashani. When the ballots were counted, the Muslim League had not only lost the election, it had been virtually eliminated as...

Pakistan’s first national election therefore proved to be no panacea. When the ballots were counted, Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won almost every seat in the National Assembly that had been allotted to East Pakistan under the LFO. Mujib now was the paramount leader in East Bengal, and, because his party had won a majority of the 300 contested seats in the National Assembly, Yahya Khan should...

influence in Bangladesh

...opposition parties led largely by Fazl ul-Haq and his revamped Peasants and Tenants Party (now called the Peasants and Workers Party) and by Suhrawardy, who had made a comeback with a new party, the Awami League. In 1955 Ghulam Mohammad left office, and Maj. Gen. Iskandar Mirza, who had served both as governor in East Bengal and as a central minister, took office as governor-general. Under...

In December 1970 Pakistan held general elections, its first since independence. The Awami League, headed by East Pakistan’s popular Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib), won a clear majority of seats in the new assembly, but West Pakistan’s chief martial law administrator and president, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, refused to honour the democratic choice of his country’s majority....

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